What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.

Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing

Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.

It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring.

We must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.